Sirsinate Releases



Instruments of Flight is the alter-ego of electronic musician Corrinne Haskins. Currently based in Northern California, she produces tracks that are suffused with a halcyon, west-coast sensibility. The sound, like the artist, is suspended somewhere between chill-wave southern California suburbia and the perverse cosmopolitanism sensibility. It’s the sound of British new wave half-remembered from a childhood spent in Long Beach. Or maybe it’s the house-fueled soundtrack of the Castro, transplanted to the lonely stretches of beach north of Santa Cruz.

Corrinne began to pursue music more seriously after completing her studies in acupuncture and herbology at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine. As a producer, she brings to the studio a discriminating ear and an uncompromising approach to sound quality. The music she grew up listening to on iconic LA stations, such as KCRW and KROQ, kindled what became an obsession with sound design and synthesis. The elements of pop, dance, and ambient will be immediately familiar to anyone with an ear for electronica, but Instruments of Flight reworks them and fashions them into something evocatively different. It’s as if you’re hearing things you thought you knew, only to discover that they sound somehow better filtered through layers of sun block, salt air, and Pacific sunsets.

Instruments of Flight

The Encounter

Kombucha Baby

Ecstatics Make the Engine

Sunscreen

It's often hard to say where the creation of a track begins. Emotional Triggers Pulled is an exception. The cut had its genesis in Roland's Virtual Analog synthesizer, the JP-8000. Fiddling with knobs in a wide-open exploration of the keyboard's sounds, Marsden programmed a pad that ended up providing the foundation for the rest of the track. It survives as almost an underscore--an element of the mix that is felt more than it is heard. Once it was in place, the rest of the track took shape along lines that seem, in retrospect, almost inevitable, from the delicacy of the introductory arpeggiation to the emphatic piano hook that becomes the piece's calling card. It's as if the music sprang, full bodied, from a moment in which the meaning of a sound was suddenly heard and apprehended. The rest was simply an unpacking of the implicit.

This is the limbic logic that overwhelms the rational world. That moment of understanding---not of the mind, but of the gut---has all the violent clarity of a gun shot. Perhaps this is why we speak of emotional triggers. And perhaps this is why the creative process is so draining and demands that we access places beyond the ratiocinative mind. These limbic explosions are destructive. They upend the order of the world. But in that upending is a new order, implicit and existing in a state of potentiality. Everyone who has ever felt any strong emotion knows something of that clairvoyant certainty, of seeing the world to come in the moment of succumbing.

Emotional Triggers Pulled

A Darkness Deeper Still

Instruments of Flight is an electronic musician currently based in Northern California, she produces tracks that are suffused with a halcyon, west-coast sensibility. The sound, like the artist, is suspended somewhere between southern California suburbia and cosmopolitan leanings. It’s the sound of British new wave half-remembered from a childhood spent in Long Beach. Or maybe it’s the house-fueled soundtrack of the Castro, transplanted to the lonely stretches of beach north of Santa Cruz. 

Born to a tenor and oboe player IOF was definitely subjected to piano lessons growing up.  She's played a variety of other instruments as well but always favored effects laden instrumentation.  4AD, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel are cited as deeply influential to the point of being unable to separate the sounds from the experience of growing up.  As a producer, she brings to the studio a discriminating ear and an uncompromising approach to sound quality. The music she grew up listening to on iconic LA stations, such as KCRW and KROQ, kindled what became an obsession with sound design and synthesis. The elements of pop, dance, and ambient will be immediately familiar to anyone with an ear for electronica, no instrument or source is off limits though clearly favoring synthetic sources she also draws from found sound and field recordings.   Instruments of Flight reworks them and fashions them into something evocatively different.  It’s as if you’re hearing things you thought you knew, only to discover that they sound somehow better filtered through salt air and Pacific sunsets.